Just when Ed Miliband’s Labour must have thought it had won all the soap operatic garlands, along came David Cameron yesterday to show them a bit of what-for. When it comes to shrewd domestic spillage, the Prime Minister remains the maestro.

We are talking here about mainline injection into the nation’s housewife vote. ITV’s mid-morning audience is the Middle England of chocolate Digestive eaters, chewing their elevenses while watching perennially perky co-presenter Phillip Schofield.

The interview was billed as Mr Cameron’s first sit-down chat since the birth of his second daughter, Florence. But there has been much else happening in the Cameron household these past few months.

Mr Schofield noted that the most stressful things in life are bereavement, house-moving, job-moving, financial uncertainty and adjusting to a new baby. ‘You’ve just done all these. You must be the most stressed man in Britain,’ said grey-spiked Phillip.

Beside Mr Schofield sat colleague Holly Willoughby, a magnificent melange of blondeish bubbles and grave nodding. Our Holly was arrayed in pinstripes, the better to appear serious. She smouldered in a sort of autumn bonfire way.

They don’t have long between the advertising breaks, so it was straight down to business: The birth of Florence, the death of Mr Cameron’s father, the state of the Coalition Government and the identity of Mr Cameron’s ‘favourite lunchtime sangwich’.

This last poser was posited by a scruffy Welsh chap relaying some of the viewers’ questions for the PM.

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Mr Cameron, typical politician, avoided the sangwich question and told us that now that he is in Downing Street he manages to eat a cooked lunch upstairs with the divine Samantha. Spaghetti bolognese had recently been enjoyed.

When discussing his father, Mr Cameron became tearful. He talked of his last meeting with his father – he had wheeled him round Chequers – and as he recalled that day he bit on his lower lip. The Digestive eaters will have noted this.

We also heard of the way Mr Cameron’s older daughter, Nancy, responded when she first met new-born Florence. She whipped out a tape measure and made a cardboard crib for the babe. Ah. Sweet. Time for another Digestive, I think.

Florence is still in the box and, said Mr Cameron, has ‘a good set of lungs’. Holly crossed her legs. Her vast eyelashes fluttered and choppy waves formed on the Thames.

Keeping his cool: The Prime Minister on This Morning with Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby

What, politically, was going on here? Why does it demand analysis? Well, the modern politician feels an imperative to betray matters that once would have gone unspoken. It creates an impression of openness and engages the electorate in the dramas of everyday life. It makes us feel we understand the politicians.

For all the squabbling, the Milibands’ recent upheavals have been a crash-course getting-to-know-you session. We may think fratricidal Ed is untrustworthy. We may think him weird. But we have heard him talk of love. We become bluebottles on the sticky paper of his existence.

Mr Cameron will suspect that this makes his opponent more voter-friendly. So he trumped him yesterday, not only with these fresh details of his own juddering dramas, but also more subtly.

For instance, he talked affectionately about his own, older brother. We kept hearing how ‘strong’ the Cameron family was. Is it cynical to note that this was all a contrast to the flick-knife fight that has passed for family relationships among the Milibands?

And the thing about Mr Cameron is that, sitting there talking about his relationships with Sam/Florence/Nancy/Mum/dead Dad/Nick Clegg/Liam Fox, he remains seamlessly calm.

Unlike Mr Miliband, he does not flubber-dubber his lips. He does not sound like a blocked lavatory drain.

He is an essay of grown-up serenity. Even while sitting opposite that testament to engineering, the statuesque Holly.